Redburn Critical Essays

Critical Evaluation

Like most of Herman Melville’s work, Redburn does not follow a conventional plot structure of complication, climax, and resolution, nor does the novel have characters who gradually develop and interact within a framework of interrelated events and circumstances. Redburn is a bildungsroman, a novel that deals with the development of a young protagonist moving from adolescence to maturity. Redburn is told by a first-person narrator who, in the course of his commentary, moves from innocence to experience.

At the outset, young Wellingborough Redburn’s existence is protected, safe from the iniquities of the world outside village life. His enthusiasm to go to sea is the desire of postadolescence to move from the innocent state of childhood into the real world, to challenge that which adults have simultaneously idealized and, for as long as they could, withheld from children. The real world, however, proves to be a darker and more forbidding place than the naïve Redburn is prepared to enter. The rules of fair play and benevolence that have governed his childhood are greatly diminished, and in their place, Redburn finds little kindness and understanding; instead, he finds more than enough selfish indifference and pointless malevolence.

Melville places great emphasis on symbols to convey complex ideas. The glass ship, the moleskin shooting jacket, and the Liverpool guidebook all invite a variety of critical interpretations. As a child growing up in his father’s house, Redburn was fascinated by a glass ship kept in a glass case. It is the basis of his great passion to go to sea, for he has grown up studying the minute detail of its glass spars and rigging and its glass figurine sailors earnestly plying their trade. The glass ship, although a strong stimulant for the imagination of an impressionable youth, suggests a fragile, tentative reality, like the imagined notion of a world one has not directly experienced. Having lived a sheltered life in his mother’s home in the Hudson Valley, Redburn is as ill-prepared to undertake a genuine voyage upon the high seas as is the glass ship. Melville seems to suggest that people are more resilient than glass, and with the aid of luck and good fortune, people can withstand suffering and the mystery of what often seems a pointless...